Five Hole (Roan Ridge University)

Chapter 1

Emile

The barn’s empty and the lights aren’t all the way up yet, half of them still buzzing awake in the rafters, one bank at a time, like the building’s blinking the sleep out of its eyes.

I come up the tunnel with my speaker under one arm and my pads riding over the other, blades knocking the rubber matting.

The cold walks up my spine, same as it does on the first day of every season.

It’s a specific cold, this. Rink cold. Older than weather.

The building’s been holding its breath all summer, and I’m the one it finally gets to breathe on.

First idiot in. That’s my title. Nobody handed it to me. I earned it. And you earn it like you earn the corner seat on the bus. By showing up before it matters to anyone else.

Guys with ice time roll in when they feel like it. Guys without it get here early and stay late, and we call that discipline so we don’t have to call it hunger. I’ve been calling it discipline for two years now. My mouth’s very good at it.

A rink kid runs a mop across the rubber by the benches, earbuds in, bucket wheels squeaking on the concrete.

He lifts his chin at me without pulling one out and I lift mine back.

We’ve never spoken. Not one word, not one season.

We do this every fall and it’s a whole relationship.

Somewhere his mother thinks he’s got no friends at the rink. He’s got me.

I drop the speaker on the bench and the metal bites cold through my glove.

I thumb through until I find something with a low end, then I crank it.

The bass comes off the boards, climbs into the empty seats, fills the bowl the way water fills a boot.

The banners up in the rafters give a little shiver.

Or I decide they do. Conference champions.

A fresh one goes up with our year on it.

I was on the ice for that game in full gear, backup mask shoved up on my head, planted at the end of the bench where they plant the backup.

Close enough to feel every hit come through the boards into my teeth.

Third period, one-goal game, the building so loud it quit being sound and turned into weather.

And I stood there in my clean dry pads, watching Casimir Wrobel go two whole periods without giving up a thing, then give up one in the third and refuse every single thing after it, like the net behind him was something he’d sworn to his mother he’d guard.

The last save of the year came in a scramble, three bodies in his blue paint, sticks hacking, and he came up out of the pile with the puck strangled in his glove. The whole barn came off its feet.

I clapped my blocker against my glove until my hands went numb. And I never touched the ice with anything that counted. Backups dress for the party. They don’t get to eat.

I’d deny this one under oath. When he made that save, when the roof came off, what came up in me wasn’t happy, and it wasn’t jealous either.

Not yet. I wanted to be the reason a building does that.

Wanted it so bad my teeth hurt worse than the hits had made them.

And the guy who’d just done it was standing in the net I decided a long time ago was going to be mine, holding a puck he had no business holding.

I hated him and I wanted to be him. Something sat under both and I had no name for it, and I wasn’t hunting one. Name a thing and you have to carry it.

I lace up on the bench, tight through the ankle, how I like it, my fingers knowing the pattern without any help from me. I step out onto fresh ice.

I love new ice, me. It hasn’t decided anything about you yet.

I take it slow to start, long crossovers through the neutral zone, the blades biting clean and throwing a hiss up behind me.

Then I quit pretending it’s a warm-up and I just skate.

Cutting hard. Throwing snow. Chasing a puck I flip off the boards ahead of myself like a kid nobody told the sport’s a job.

I go down to the far net and drop into it.

His net, technically. The starter’s. Nobody’s here to run me out, so I fold into a crouch I’m not built for and dare the empty slot to come try me.

Laid out flat, the season is one argument.

One net. One crease. One job. One name at the top of the list. And every letter of it spells Wrobel, first exhibition to the last save of the final.

Most Outstanding. They handed him a little brass thing at center ice and he held it out from his body like it might come alive in his hands.

This is the year the list changes. I decided it. I decide a lot of things. And most of them come true, because I’m too stubborn to let them not.

I skate out of his crease before I like it too much.

I go find the equipment room, because I want my stall set right, and he’s in there.

He’s always in there. First idiot in has competition and its name is Casimir Wrobel.

He beats me here every single day. And he does it without music.

I don’t know how a man stands that much quiet on purpose. Nobody has ever explained it to me.

The equipment room’s got no windows and one bad fluorescent, a tube that ticks when it thinks about dying and makes everybody look a day dead.

The whole place smells like old sweat and fresh tape and the pink soap in the wall dispenser.

In the flat gray of it he’s a shape on the bench, back half to me, his gear laid out above his stall in the order he keeps it, each piece square to the next.

Like place settings at a table nobody’s allowed to eat at.

I’ve heard the story. Everybody’s heard some version. Kept the same order since he was a kid, back in bantam, some winter that did something to him. Now the whole team steps around that shelf like it’s a shrine. And steps around him like the shrine has teeth.

He’s got the blocker in his hands, turning it, checking the lace. He doesn’t look up.

“Wrobel,” I say.

Nothing. He sets the blocker down and it goes into its spot with a small click of foam on wood, his hand already moving to the next thing.

Here’s what I’ve worked out about a man built like this.

Everybody thinks the point of him is that you can’t get in.

Wrong. The point is that somewhere in all that mortar there’s a soft brick, a hinge painted shut, and whoever finds it owns the whole house.

Our sport even has a word for it. Five-hole.

The gap between the pads, dead center, the one place the whole crouch exists to hide.

The guys who make a living off it do it a certain way, which is they look a goalie in the eye and go straight up the pipe anyway.

And the crouch means nothing once you know where the gap is.

Casimir Wrobel is the best I’ve ever stood near.

So I want his gap, bad enough it’s cost me sleep I’ll never cop to.

I walk to the shelf and feel the room change, feel him clock me.

A dog clocking a stranger at the fence. Some animal thing pulling tight without a single muscle moving.

I reach up and take his glove, the one that lives on the left of the shelf, worn pale at the heel where he catches.

It’s heavier than mine. Broken in like a good boot. I set it down on the right.

He goes to stone. Not slow. All at once, hands first, up the arms, into the jaw, and the jaw sets into a hard flat line.

I’ve seen it twice before. Once in the room after the championship, when I slid a shin pad off its spot on a dare from nobody and got nothing back at all.

Once in here, the day the doors opened again, when he looked at me like I’d set something ticking on his kitchen table. He looks at me like that now.

“Fortin.” Two syllables. He reads my name off me like a penalty off a card.

“Wrobel.” I nod at the glove sitting wrong. “How’s that feel?”

His eyes drop to it. Track it. There’s a muscle going in his cheek, small and furious, the only part of him with anything to say.

The day the doors opened, I asked did it matter. He said yes so fast it came out sharp, like the word had been sitting behind his teeth waiting. So I told him, tell me why. And what I got, finally, like I was drawing it out with pliers, was because it does. Not a reason. A locked box.

I’ve been shaking that box next to my ear ever since.

“You could just tell me.” I keep it light, grin on, the good grin, the one that’s talked me out of penalty boxes and into a couple of beds.

It has never landed on this man, which is honestly ninety percent of why I keep firing it at him.

“Why does it matter? Tell me and I’ll fix it myself.

I’ll never touch the shelf again. Best-behaved backup this conference has ever seen.

Ask anybody. Ask the mop kid. He’s known me two years and has not had one complaint about me.

Not one word. That’s a testimonial you can take to the bank. ”

“You have never been well-behaved for a full minute in your life.”

Most words he’s put in a row for me all week. I about fall over. “Crisse, you’ve been counting my minutes, Wrobel? I’m touched. Truly.”

“I keep a list.”

“Of my minutes?”

“Of my problems. You are near the top.”

I put a hand over my heart. “Top of a Wrobel list, calisse. Day one. Guys train years for that.”

“To be lower.”

It lands. On me. Clean, right up the middle. I have to fight not to laugh at the man insulting me. He picks up the chest protector and checks a strap that doesn’t need checking, and I keep talking, because talking’s what I do when the other guy won’t. It’s a reflex. Practically a diagnosis.

“You know what I think?” I lean a hip on the end of his stall and I can feel him hate it.

He hates it in his shoulders. “I think you could put that glove back from all the way over there without even looking. I think you know where every piece of this lives, down to the last hair. So it’s not that you can’t reach it.

It’s that you can’t stand it sitting wrong for as long as it takes me to say sorry.

” I tilt my head. “Am I warm? Tell me I’m warm. ”

His hands go still on the strap. Just for a breath. Then they move again, and he sets the chest protector down square in its spot without once looking at me. I’ve been around him long enough. The not-looking is the loudest thing he owns.

He stands. He isn’t fast, exactly. He crosses the room slow and certain, no hurry in it, no stopping it either, and then he’s close.

Close enough I catch the cold coming off him, a guy who’s been sitting in a walk-in cooler of a room since before the lights came up.

He lifts the glove off the wrong side and sets it back where it lives.

The correction is so precise it’s almost gentle.

Like he’s straightening a wing on something small.

“It matters,” he says, “because it matters.”

Then he looks at me. Straight up out of himself. There and gone.

And in the there-and-gone, something gives. High up, near the top of him. A window I hadn’t found. The light moves behind it once. Then the blind drops, it’s shut, and he’s stone again.

But I saw it. I saw it.

He goes back to the shelf like I already left the room.

I get my bag. I find my stall, three down from his, and I set my speaker where the speaker goes.

I sit there with my pulse in my ears while the room fills.

Guys trickle in, gear bags drop, the ordinary noise of a team waking up after a summer apart.

Skate guards clatter into the bin. Somebody swears at a knot in a lace.

Rocco Rizzo comes through and thumps my shoulder without a word, which from Rocco is a benediction.

He drops onto the bench down the row to tape a stick he already taped yesterday.

Vinh flops down next to me. No gear yet, just here to be here. He steals the corner of the tape off my knee.

“You went and bugged Casimir already.” Not a question. “It’s the first day, Fortin. You couldn’t give the man one first day?”

“I said hello.”

“You said hello.” He grins. He’s got a way of grinning that makes you feel caught even when he’s the one who brought it up. “You moved his glove. Don’t tell me you didn’t move his glove. You’ve got the face of a man who moved a glove.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You’ve got several. That’s the problem.” He grins wider. “You know he’s the reason we got through the conference semi. You know that.”

“I know it better than anybody in this building. I had the best seat for it.” I hear it land a little too sharp, so I roll it back with a shrug. “The bench. Great view. He’s a wall. A guy’s allowed to admire a wall.”

Vinh looks at me a second past comfortable. He came up through figure skating, that one, and he clocks things the rest of us miss. Weight, edges, where a body’s going before it goes there. Right now he’s got all of it pointed at me and I don’t love it.

“Sure,” he says finally, easy, letting me off the hook because that’s just how Vinh is. “Admire the wall.” He peels the rest of my tape off, sticks it to my visor, and he’s gone before I can get him back.

Then the room is loud and ordinary again, guys and gear and a story about a boat nobody will ever finish building.

I sit there with tape on my visor and my heart finally coming down out of my throat, and I think: there.

That’s the gap. Never the glove. The glove was only ever the doorbell.

The gap is the look he didn’t mean to hand me.

I’m going to find every window this man has ever bricked over.

And I’m going to put my face to the glass until he lets me in or throws something at my head.

This is the year I take his net.

I just don’t know yet it’s also the year I stop being able to tell that want from the other one.